Editor's Note: NewsBusters Publisher and Media Research Center President President Brent Bozell released the following statement today regarding the broadcast and cable news media's silence about President Barack Obama's use of a crass sexual slang term to refer to Tea Party members.
If President George W. Bush had slurred the gay-rights movement during his presidency, it would have immediately dominated the news of every single national media outlet. Reporters would have pummeled the Administration and demanded an explanation and apology for the offense, and rightly so. You don’t smear anyone – let alone fellow Americans who elected you to office – regardless of your political differences.
Yet ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN haven’t even lifted an eyebrow since news broke that President Obama used the raunchy ‘teabagger’ slur to demean the hundreds of thousands of Americans who comprise the Tea Party movement. Reporters should be asking questions like:
• Does this fly in the face of Obama’s mantra of respect for diversity?
• Does he stand behind likening these Americans to a derogatory slang for oral sex?
• Is this hypocritical coming from the same Administration that was too squishy to use the phrase “War on Terror?”
Instead, they spike coverage. Not because they didn’t know about it, but because it comes from the same radically liberal President whom they worked so hard to elect and it offends the same conservative group of Americans they have worked so hard to characterize as violent, racist, and homophobic.